Good Food is First Food. It is not junk food. It is the food that connects nature and nutrition with livelihoods. This food is good for our health; it comes from the rich biodiversity of our regions; it provides employment to people. Most importantly, cooking and eating give us pleasure. …
The health of honey bee colonies cannot be understood apart from the landscapes in which they live. Urban and agricultural developments are two of the most dramatic and widespread forms of human land use, but their respective effects on honey bees remain poorly understood. Here, we evaluate the relative attractiveness …
Global climate change projections for Nepal and the Himalayas suggest significant changes in temperature and precipitation, including increased monsoon (summer) precipitation and more variable and highly unpredictable actual rainfall patterns. The projections also suggest warmer winters and more frequent extreme weather events, with extended droughts between periods of intense rain. …
Peatlands are carbon-rich ecosystems that cover just three per cent of Earth’s land surface, but store one-third of soil carbon. Peat soils are formed by the build-up of partially decomposed organic matter under waterlogged anoxic conditions. Most peat is found in cool climatic regions where unimpeded decomposition is slower, but …
In this paper we reflect on aspects of palaeoecological approaches to understanding past woodland environments. With increasing requirements for interdisciplinarity in research, and an increase in popular interest in the ‘natural environment’ such as ‘new nature writing’, we suggest that palaeoecology is potentially well situated to engage with other audiences …
A new report enables agricultural companies to set science-based greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions targets for key commodities. Funded by the KR Foundation, the University of Aberdeen, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and Ecofys have developed a new science-based target setting methodology for key commodities of the Agriculture, Forestry and Other …
There is great uncertainty over the timing and magnitude of the termination of the African Humid Period (AHP). Spanning from the early to middle Holocene, the AHP was a period of enhanced moisture over most of northern and eastern Africa. However, beginning 8000 years ago the moisture balance shifted due …
Nonhuman primates, our closest biological relatives, play important roles in the livelihoods, cultures, and religions of many societies and offer unique insights into human evolution, biology, behavior, and the threat of emerging diseases. They are an essential component of tropical biodiversity, contributing to forest regeneration and ecosystem health. Current information …
The populations of light-demanding trees that dominate the canopy of central African forests are now aging. Here, we show that the lack of regeneration of these populations began ca. 165 ya (around 1850) after major anthropogenic disturbances ceased. Since 1885, less itinerancy and disturbance in the forest has occurred because …
Ongoing deforestation is a pressing, global environmental issue with direct impacts on climate change, carbon emissions, and biodiversity. There is an intuitive link between economic development and overexploitation of natural resources including forests, but this relationship has proven difficult to establish empirically due to both inadequate data and convoluting geo-climactic …
A simultaneous analysis of 13 years of remotely sensed data of land cover, fires, precipitation, and aerosols from the MODIS, TRMM, and MISR satellites and the AERONET network over Southeast Asia is performed, leading to a set of robust relationships between land-use change and fire being found on inter-annual and …
Revenues derived from carbon have been seen as an important tool for supporting forest conservation over the past decade. At the same time, there is high uncertainty about how much revenue can reasonably be expected from land use emissions reductions initiatives. Despite this uncertainty, REDDþ projects and conservation initiatives that …
Order of the National Green Tribunal (Eastern Zone Bench, Kolkata) in the matter of Pawan Kumar Somani Vs State of West Bengal & Others dated 05/01/2017. The applicant (Pawan Kumar Somani) has prayed for issuance of a direction upon the respondents to first quantify the area of wet land/marshy land/low …
A new study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, locates hotspots of threats to wildlife and describes how they are related to consumers' demand in other parts of the world. Identifying hotspots of species threat has been a successful approach for setting conservation priorities. One important challenge in …
Effective monitoring of deforestation and cropland expansion in Africa requires reliable estimates of land cover area. However, continental scale land cover datasets generated solely or partially through remote sensing technologies show large differences in the extent and spatial distribution of forest and cropland. In this working paper identify 14 of …
Greenhouse gas emissions from the land-use sector will be lower if the rising demand for bioenergy is met with worldwide protection for areas important for biodiversity and carbon storage, shows this IIASA policy brief. Increasing demand for bioenergy in the EU means that there is a pressing need to understand …
This study identifies domestic and international public finance that limited deforestation and encouraged sustainable land use in Côte d’Ivoire in 2015. It provides a baseline against which to measure progress towards the levels of investment required to meet government goals for sustainable agriculture and reforestation. It also identifies opportunities to …
This report provides the technical description of seven models on ecosystem services on a European scale. The ecosystem services included are carbon sequestration, erosion prevention, flood regulation, pollination, pest control, recreation and wild food provisioning. Those models can be used for analysing future developments in the delivery of ecosystem services. …
Reconstructions of the vegetation of Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) are an enigma. Pollen-based analyses have suggested that Europe was largely covered by steppe and tundra, and forests persisted only in small refugia. Climate-vegetation model simulations on the other hand have consistently suggested that broad areas of Europe …
Smallholder farming is the most prevalent form of agriculture in the world, supports many of the planet’s most vulnerable populations, and coexists with some of its most diverse and threatened landscapes. However, there is little information about the location of small farms, making it difficult both to estimate their numbers …
Several modelling studies have highlighted the risk that biofuel production on agricultural land can displace existing food and animal feed production. This could indirectly lead to the conversion of forests and other natural land into new cropland to compensate for the displaced production. This indirect land use change effect is …
